What’s Going On With Disney And Amazon?
Update: Now Amazon says they will be shipping the Doctor Strange Blu-ray within 1 – 2 months.
If you recently tried to pre-order Disney titles on Blu-ray such as Doctor Strange, Moana and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story through Amazon, you were out of luck. Unfortunately, you have to look elsewhere because those titles are not available for purchase on Amazon.
What’s unusual about all of this, is that you can still purchase the movies digitally and on DVD through Amazon, just not on Blu-ray.
It appears that Disney and Amazon are in some kind of stand off. Whatever agreement they had previously has fallen apart. If I had to guess, I would say it is Disney that is trying to get Amazon to crack by not allowing their most recent popular movies available for purchase on their site. But it could also be Amazon wanting a larger piece of the profit and refusing to allow Disney Blu-rays to be sold on their site.
By not allowing consumers to purchase the Doctor Strange Blu-ray through Amazon, it seems to have created a demand at brick and mortar stores but there is not enough supply to meet the demand.
I had a difficult time finding a Doctor Strange Blu-ray on release day. I also spoke to friends around the country that were having the same problem. Since I couldn’t purchase the disk through Amazon, I decided to stop by my local Wal-Mart. When I got there, there was a huge display dedicated to Doctor Strange, but there were no discs in the display. I asked one of the employees if they had any in the back and he said that they were all sold out. They only had DVD’s available. I’ve never seen that happen before. I finally was lucky enough to find one at Target, but they were in short supply.
I did check Amazon recently and you can now purchase the Doctor Strange Blu-ray, but there is a catch. If you add the item to your cart, you receive a message saying that the item is temporarily out of stock and that you will be notified when they have more information. That may be Amazon’s way of trying to cover things up with their customers, trying to reassure them that there is no problem. You still can not preorder the Moana and the Rogue One Blu-rays.
I’m sure both sides are working to resolve this issue because in the end it not only hurts the consumer but it has to hurt both companies revenue stream.